Georgia on Their Mind

Posted by Mike Finnegan
on
August 03, 2017

Making note of today’s National Georgia Day observance,
it’s only fitting that movie lovers should celebrate the state as the
Southeastern U.S. center of film and television production it has become, with
the current box-office successes Guardians
of the Galaxy 2 and Baby Driver (2017)
as conspicuous examples among dozens. The Twilight Time hi-def Blu-ray library
boasts noteworthy examples of both the hugely invested and just-passing-through
variety. Among the former, the label’s recently sold-out release of Jean
Renoir’s fugitives-on-the-run melodrama Swamp
Water (1941) plunged audiences into the harrowing and shadowy pitfalls of
the Okefenokee swamplands, where the esteemed French filmmaker took principal
cast members and a location-shoot crew to capture the region’s natural beauty
and innate spookiness. The Buddy Holly Story (1978)
employed the exterior of one of Atlanta’s cultural treasures, the landmark Fox
Theatre, to stand in for New York’s historic Apollo Theatre, because its
elaborate marquee was an easily adaptable match for that of the Apollo’s in the
late 1950s, the site of a career-propelling Holly concert
stand, set-dressed with a complement of vintage automobiles recruited from
area aficionados to line the street-front. Director Martin Ritt, for whom
geography has always been a vital cinematic storytelling element in such TT
titles as The Long, Hot Summer (1958, coming August 15) and the sold-out The Sound and the Fury, both lensed in
dusty, small-town Louisiana; Hombre (1967) amid rugged Arizona
landscapes and hills; and the urban-set The Front (1976) and Stanley
& Iris (1990), respectively in New York City and Waterbury, CT,
traveled to Georgia for one of his more underrated and yet deeply felt
projects. The adaptation of Pat Conroy’s celebrated autobiographical book The Water Is Wide, renamed Conrack
(1974) for the big screen in screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet
Frank Jr.’s adaptation, is largely set on Yamacraw Island off the South
Carolina coast. But the real location for this tale of a novice teacher (Jon
Voight) who struggles to raise the physical and spiritual circumstances of his
poverty-entrapped, poorly-educated students was actually Georgia’s Brunswick
Island, where the natural beauty of the sun-drenched, balmily wind-blown open
environment stands as a metaphor of possibilities that regrettably butt up
against the ramshackle realities of the islanders’ painfully limited,
racism-constricted existence. Locally recruited youngsters from Brunswick’s
C.B. Greer Elementary School played Conroy/”Conrack’s” contentious yet
questioning charges, and it is through a reappraisal of their own environment,
channeled by a caring outsider, that a gradual progress is made. The theme of
human potential is greatly enhanced through the superb contributions of
cinematographer John A. Alonzo and composer John Williams. Though the outcome of
what could have been a formulaic “education-is-good” tale is ultimately blighted
by a harsh bureaucratic crackdown, it is clear by film’s end that hope has been
injected and dreams stimulated, clearly what Ritt, Ravetch and Frank intended
via this Georgia interlude. For an atmospherically rewarding trip to the
Peachtree State, sign up in Conrack’s class here: http://www.screenarchives.com/title_detail.cfm/ID/26735/CONRACK-1974/.